Special Effects
Cartoon spoofs how they were done during the silent picture era
In 1914, the films were still silent. This vignette cartoon depicting scenes from the making of movies with a focus on how special effects were created.
Vignettes clockwise from top:
Actors from different historical films dining together
Rain from watering can
Stunt man needs to repeat his fall down stairs
Horse painted into a zebra
Emaciated lion balks at goat
Woman “leaps” into waiting mattresses
Train silhouette stands in for a passing train
Fake columns light enough for a boy to move
At center is "The ancestral gallery of the future - picture of grandfather at breakfast" showing a group of upper class people with a movie projector illuminating a painting hanging on a wall that shows a man sipping tea from a saucer. Note: I’m a bit puzzled by the connection between the central cartoon and vignettes around the border.
The 1910s saw the origins of Hollywood as the centre of the American film industry relocated from New York to California. By 1912, major motion-picture companies had set up production near or in Los Angeles.
In the early 1900s, most motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, and filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions.
To escape this, filmmakers began moving out west, where Edison's patents could not be enforced. Also, the weather was ideal and there was quick access to various settings. Los Angeles became the capital of the film industry.
Feature films made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format that was analogous to that of the legitimate theatre and was suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays.
This new audience had more demanding standards than the older working-class one, and producers readily increased their budgets to provide high technical quality and elaborate productions.
The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theatres in the major urban centres (one of the first was Mitchell L. Marks’s 3,300-seat Strand, which opened in the Broadway district of Manhattan in 1914).
Known as “dream palaces” because of the fantastic luxuriance of their interiors, these houses had to show features rather than a program of shorts to attract large audiences at premium prices.
These improvements were just in time for two big films that were right around the corner: DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith followed this up with the even bigger Intolerance (1916)
~ History of Film - Britannica.
Title: In the movies / Hy Mayer ; by Hy Mayer.
Cartoonist: Mayer, Henry, 1868-1954, artist
Created / Published: New York : Published by Puck Publishing Corporation, 295-309 Lafayette Street,
Date: 1914 September 26.
Library of Congress: LC-DIG-ppmsca-28089
Henry Mayer (18 July 1868 – 27 September 1954), often seen as Hy Mayer in signatures, using the traditional abbreviation for Henry, was a German-American cartoonist and animator. Here’s one of Hy Mayer’s most famous cartoons: The Awakening
"Bring in the Zebra, it's going to rain" struck me as the perfect metaphor for political speech rather than movies. Delete that Tweet!
My era!